Conventional systems for detecting transaction fraud operate using fraud rules. Fraud rules can be instituted to deny that transactions that appear to be potentially fraudulent. On the one hand, very stringent fraud rules will deny many transactions, even ones that might be legitimate. Transactions that are rejected improperly by fraud rules are called “false positives.” This is undesirable. On the other hand, fraud rules which do not capture many transactions may be allowing fraudulent transactions to occur. This is also not desirable.
An entity such as an issuer or transaction processor may employ a set of fraud rules and may obtain some overall rejection and false positive rate that would appear to be acceptable to that entity. However, that entity may not actually know whether or not the performance that results from the set of rules is actually an optimum set of fraud rules.
Embodiments of the disclosure address this and other problems, individually and collectively.